Unborn victims bill headed for March vote
A bill before the
House of Commons
that would make it a crime to kill or injure an unborn child is
expected to
come up for a final vote sometime in March, the Ottawa Sun reported
last week.
As
recent homicides in
Private
member’s bill C-484 seeks to close that
gap. Critics of the Unborn
Victims of Crime Act, as it is called, argue that passing it would
threaten
a woman’s right to choose whether or not to abort a pregnancy. But
Alberta
Conservative MP Ken Epp, who tabled the bill last month, denies that.
“I’ve
made no secret of the fact that I’m pro-life,” Epp told the Sun.
“But
this bill goes very narrowly at one issue – where the woman has made
the choice
to have the child, and that choice is taken away unilaterally, without
her
consent and usually with violence.”
A
case in point occurred just last week in
“At
this point, it’s unclear if Hoeppner was the intended target of the
gunshots
aimed through her closed front door,” wrote Winnipeg Sun columnist
Joyanne Pursaga.
“But
it’s exactly this type of violence that displays a need for more
deterrents to
dissuade criminals so bold they don’t even bother to look at their
targets
before they start shooting. If someone intentionally shoots blindly at
another
person, that person must be held responsible for that choice and every
death it
causes.”
At
the same time, C-484 makes it clear that a woman’s alleged attacker
would need
to have known of her pregnancy in order to be charged with killing or
injuring
her baby.
“I
ask myself the question,” said Ontario Liberal MP Derek Lee in support of
Epp’s bill, according
to Hansard, “who could
reasonably deny to a
child prior to birth during an assault or another criminal attack on
the
mother, knowing that the mother is pregnant, the protection of the Criminal
Code that that child deserves? I could not deny that. It sounds so
very
reasonable.”
Yet
abortion advocates are afraid that C-484 could ultimately imperil a
woman’s
right to abortion since it presumes that an unborn child is a human
being and
therefore entitled to protection under the law.
While
claiming to be “against abortion,” Bloc Québécois MP Raymond Gravel, a Roman
Catholic priest, told MPs that “the problem
of abortion will be
solved with these types of measures and not by re-criminalizing
abortion. I
absolutely do not want that.”
